Why Negro Spirituals Are Not Just Songs

When I stand before an audience — whether in a concert hall in Madrid, a cathedral in Lyon, or a festival stage in the Canary Islands — and I open my mouth to sing a Negro Spiritual, I am not performing a song. I am carrying a prayer that someone sang in a field two hundred years ago, under a sky they did not choose, in a language that was forced upon them, about a God they made their own.

That distinction matters to me more than almost anything else in my work as a singer. And it is the reason I bristle, gently, when I hear someone describe these works as "old songs" or "folk music" or "traditional hymns," as if they are quaint artifacts from a finished chapter of history. Negro Spirituals are not relics. They are living documents — of faith, of resistance, of an intelligence so profound that it hid freedom inside a hymn and survival inside a melody.

Born in Bondage, Raised in Faith

The story of the Negro Spiritual begins in the worst of circumstances. Beginning in 1619, enslaved Africans were brought to the American colonies and systematically stripped of their languages, their instruments, their cultural practices, and their names. But there was one thing their captors could not take: their voices.

In Africa, music had been woven into every part of daily life — celebrations, mourning, work, worship. When enslaved people were introduced to Christianity, they found in the Bible stories that mirrored their own suffering with startling precision. The Hebrew children in bondage in Egypt. Daniel in the lion's den. Moses leading his people to freedom. Joshua at the walls of Jericho. These were not abstract parables to people living in chains. These were their stories, retold in a new tongue.

And so they sang. In praise houses and brush arbor meetings. In fields and along riverbanks. In the call-and-response tradition carried from West Africa, where a leader would sing a line and the community would answer. They created an entirely new form of musical expression — one that scholars would eventually recognize as one of the largest and most significant bodies of American folk music ever produced. There are roughly six thousand known Spirituals on record, and that number likely represents only a fraction of what once existed, because these songs were born in an oral tradition among people who were forbidden by law to read or write.

In 2007, the United States Congress unanimously passed twin resolutions recognizing the African American Spiritual as a National Treasure — a designation that had already been given to Rock and Roll and the Blues, both of which trace their roots directly back to the Spirituals themselves.

More Than Meets the Ear

One of the most remarkable things about Negro Spirituals is that they often operated on more than one level of meaning at the same time.

On the surface, a Spiritual might sound like a song about heaven, about crossing the River Jordan, about being carried home by angels. And it was that — genuinely, sincerely, a song of faith. But beneath the surface, those same words could carry an entirely different message. The beauty of it was that enslaved people could sing these songs openly, in full hearing of the slaveholder, and the slaveholder would hear nothing but a hymn.

Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist who had himself been enslaved, wrote about this directly in his autobiography. He recalled singing "O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan" and noted that a careful listener might have detected something more than a hope of reaching heaven. They meant to reach the North — and the North was their Canaan.

Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad, used Spirituals as operational tools. Her biographer Sarah Bradford documented how Tubman sang "Go Down, Moses" to signal enslaved people that she was in the area and ready to lead them north. She would adjust the tempo of her singing to indicate whether the timing was safe for escape or whether danger was near.

These are not legends. These are documented accounts from primary sources.

Now, I want to be honest about something, because accuracy matters to me. Scholars have long debated how widespread the use of coded Spirituals truly was. Some of the more dramatic claims — that specific songs contained detailed escape maps, for instance — are difficult to verify, precisely because the oral tradition left no written record and because aiding escape was illegal. The full truth of what these songs carried may never be entirely recoverable, because the people who created them were deliberately denied the tools to document their own history.

But what we do know is extraordinary enough. We know that these songs operated on multiple levels of meaning simultaneously. We know that Tubman and Douglass and others used them as communication tools. And we know that the people who created them were brilliant enough to hide freedom inside a hymn, resistance inside a lullaby, and directions inside a prayer — all while their captors heard nothing but singing.

Songs I Carry

Let me walk you through a few of the Spirituals that I have lived with for most of my life — songs I recorded with the Moses Hogan Chorale and the Moses Hogan Singers, and songs I continue to perform on stages around the world.

"Go Down, Moses" is one of the most powerful Spirituals ever created. On its face, it retells the story of Exodus — Moses demanding that Pharaoh release the Israelites from bondage. "Let my people go" — that phrase repeats like a heartbeat through the entire song. But for enslaved people, Pharaoh was the slaveholder. Egypt was the plantation. And Moses, in many tellings, was Harriet Tubman herself, who was known by that name among the people she liberated. When this song was sung in the fields, it was an anthem of defiance hiding in plain sight.

"Wade in the Water" sounds like it is about baptism — about God troubling the water, about the faithful walking into the stream. And it is a baptismal song. But it was also desperately practical advice. If you were running and being pursued, you got into the water. Dogs cannot track a scent through a river. To wade in the water was to disappear.

"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" is perhaps the most beloved Spiritual in the world. People sing it at sporting events. They sing it at funerals. The surface is a song about dying and being carried to heaven. But in the context of enslavement, the chariot was the Underground Railroad. The band of angels were the conductors. To swing low meant to come south. To carry me home meant to bring me to freedom in the North.

"Steal Away to Jesus" is one of the most tender and heartbreaking songs in the repertoire. On the surface, it is a song of longing for heaven — stealing away from the pain of this world into the arms of God. But it was also used to signal that an escape was being planned. To steal away meant exactly what it said.

"Deep River" speaks of crossing over to a place of peace. "My home is over Jordan." The River Jordan, in the Biblical tradition, is the crossing point into the Promised Land. For enslaved people in the American South, the Jordan was often the Ohio River — the boundary between the slave states and the free states. To cross the deep river was to cross into freedom.

"Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" is what scholars call a sorrow song — slower, more mournful, a direct expression of grief. It carries no coded message. It is simply the truth of a human being who is suffering and who trusts that God sees what no one else does. When I sing this song, I feel the weight of every person who ever sang it before me. That weight is not a burden. It is a responsibility.

Why This Matters Now

I have spent much of my career singing these songs far from the land where they were born. I have sung them in Spain, in France, in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Greece, in Portugal, in Australia. I have watched audiences who do not speak English weep at the sound of "Deep River" — not because they understood every word, but because the music itself carries a truth that transcends language.

When I was a teenager, traveling with the Moses Hogan Chorale and later the Moses Hogan Singers under the direction of the late, great Moses Hogan — a fellow son of New Orleans whose arrangements of these songs revitalized the entire tradition — I began to understand that performing Spirituals was not like performing any other music. Moses taught us that these songs demanded something different from the singer. They demanded that you understood not just the notes and the rhythms and the harmonics, but the history. The suffering. The faith. The defiance. You could not simply sing a Spiritual. You had to mean it.

The two albums of Negro Spirituals that I recorded with those ensembles are now preserved in the permanent collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France — the national library of France. I think about that sometimes. Songs that were created by people who were denied the right to write their own names are now held in one of the oldest and most respected cultural archives in the world. That is not irony. That is justice.

These songs deserve to be understood for what they truly are: acts of creation born from the most brutal conditions in American history, sung by people who were told they were less than human and who responded by producing art so profound, so enduring, so divine that the United States Congress would one day call it a National Treasure.

They are not old songs. They are not quaint. They are not simple.

They are the sound of a people who refused to be silenced. And every time I sing one, I hear them — still singing, still free, still unbroken.